Everything is Awesome

We have a lot of Lego in our house, and more seems to be added every time relations and friends visit. When a new set arrives, it’s always easy and enjoyable to help the kids assemble the pieces – no matter how complex the set may be. But it’s easy and enjoyable because every piece is placed neatly in the pack beside a pristine instruction booklet.

2 months later, however, the pieces from that set are jumbled up with thousands of other pieces and trying to make the same set again is pretty much impossible!

My 3-year-old boy grew up with two older brothers and completely by-passed the Duplo phase and moved straight to the complex Lego City and Technix. He is way too busy to wait for Daddy to build a four-storey fire station, complete with 2 helicopters, 3 fire engines, and a burning alien roller-coaster Transformer (he thinks I’m a Master Builder). It was taking many joyless hours to find the pieces I was looking for, even for the simplest item, so I began to take shortcuts. The fire engines turned out a little more multi-coloured than the picture, with 4 different wheels and ill-matching windows. It was always nerve-wrecking to hand it over to the little auditor for inspection while waiting to hear about the irregularities in my work. Sound familiar?

In an effort to help deal with this high-pressure environment, my wife and I decided to spend a long weekend sorting the Lego. We bought 12 plastic boxes and set about separating the thousands of pieces into different colours and types. We then went through the box containing all the instructions and stuck the errant pages back in the right place. Three days later, we had everything neatly organized and ready for production. Less time searching, more time building!

We put the protocol, the eligibility criteria, the visit schedule and all the procedural information in their own series of easy-to-access boxes. We also make the instruction booklet available at the right time and in the way site staff want it.

So, in our own way, we make building even the most complex alien roller-coaster Transformer easier, faster, and more fun!